Hitting the Reset Button

So, it’s been a good long time since I’ve been around here. Let me take a moment to blow off some of the cobwebs on the site here before we get down to brass tax.

First, a quick history.

When I jumped into writing in 2012, I did it with all the best intentions. I planned to write every single day, update my site frequently, and do everything I knew I needed to do to be successful. And it worked! Book sales took off, and I stumbled my way into a successful writing career. It was messy at times, and I fumbled a few balls along the way, but once everything started clicking it seemed like I couldn’t do any wrong. My first series, Deadlocked, came out right around the time the zombie fad was in full swing, and there was a time where if you typed the word ‘zombie’ into Amazon, my books were some of the first things that popped up. Things were good!

After Deadlocked, I experimented with a book about vampire hunters that never really took off, but my next project was what would become my best seller: 314. That trilogy did better than I could’ve ever imagined, and it helped me overcome my fear that the only reason I was experiencing success was because of the zombie fad. 314 has nothing to do with zombies, but it far outsold anything I’d written before. It did so well that I had powerful agents come knocking at my door, and it felt like I was leaping into the big time.

A good life lesson that we should all take note of is that when everything seems like it’s going perfect, you should still check for cracks in the foundation.

I won’t bore you with the details, but basically the books I wanted to write didn’t mesh with the books that a publisher felt would sell, and very quickly it became apparent that my relationship with my agent was going nowhere. No big loss. I was doing fine on my own.

But this is a fickle, fickle market. While I continued to write, and even jumped into new genres to challenge myself, the book sales began to slump. After a while, it became apparent that I wasn’t going to be able to support my family with books alone, which meant I needed to jump back into the real world and get a paying gig. That, of course, severely impeded my writing time, which is why the number of books I was coming out with slowed way down. And with that, sales slumped even farther.

Such is life. One day you’re on top of the world, and the next you’re struggling to hold your world up. Adversity builds character, and there’s nothing a writer likes more than building characters!

That brings me to today. I’ve got a wealth of stories banging around in my head, and I want to get them out there as quickly as possible. It’s going to take some discipline on my part, which is why I’m writing this post. This is my attempt at accountability. By promising to post at least a couple times a week on this site, I can hopefully force myself to focus on the proper trajectory for my writing career. Because if you’re not done with me, then I’m not done with you either!